Translating Cuba

JANUICEBERG

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

For the first time in months, I have sweated today. My forehead. It pearls itself first in innocent droplets. Then comes the sensation of steam on the temple. Smoke in the head. Sweat, sadness, salt. Filthy osmosis of bacteria and enzymes. Sadness that the Cuban climate remains real.

I need a faraway love. A love beyond the Artic Circle. Even when, these days, ice is melting there, too. Better yet. It will be a love of the end of times, so we can witness, together, the summer death of this planet. Criminal dog days heat. Mine will have to be a love who doesn’t speak a bit of Spanish. Or, in any case, one who speaks it so correctly that it comes out with a disguised accent; an affected sweetness, an academic dictionary, a post traumatic accent: lax, almost dyslalia. I ask for an immigrant language for my Nordic love, who will melt, immediately, under the horizontal rays of a murderous sun. I ask for an ephemeral love that leaves me, in the end, very lonely, with a tiny puddle of iceberg water under my feet. A love that makes me piss myself with sadness, but not with sweat. The urea is more drinkable than real tears.

If anyone knows of a love such as this, please pass along my personal information: it is everywhere in this blog and in half of the Cuban Internet (“Cuban Internet” is an exaggeration.) It will have to be a girl, for the time being. Sorry. A girl with Cuba in her head, on top of all contradictions, even if it is Cuba as a curse. A sweet girl with a bit of roughness to her, yet not foolishness. Scandinavian, but not scandalous. One who knows from the start what this pull-and-push love is all about. One who understands that we are already in the aftermath of not just my country. One who will want to dissolve herself in the high latitudes and never return again to the humiliation of our vertical light, disciplinary and totalitarian, official photons of a Tropical island in its sterile Revolution state of things.

A girl who is capable of breeding. Capable of gravity: to be in a grave state of me. With me in her interior body, in case she doesn’t die in her melting and I had to volatilize myself. Leap into the void, like that adult lady did last week, jumping from the top of the FOCSA building, in La Habanada. Hang myself from a nameless tree, like what that teenage girl, the daughter of diplomats, did to avoid, with prepubescent shame, a 2011 in this half-stupid island. To commit the arrogant act of disappearing, like the best José Martí once dreamed of before he almost outed himself from a shot and a mortal cutlass gash: “I know how to disappear.”

Today I have sweated and I realize I had forgotten that detail. I can not bear. I don’t wish to insist. I don’t have refuge in here for my guts. I don’t deserve such lack of winter illusion. As a child, “winter” and “life” were synonymous (it was my father’s fault; those stories he would plagiarize to make me sleep.) As an older guy, “winter” and “life” have become antipodes. I am leaving. I am defeated. Girl, come. Come convinced.

January 5 2011

There are three, twelve-story buildings behind my house. Because they are lined up next to one another, people call the complex the Chinese Wall. Behind the buildings, there is a void full of dogs and rats, where improvised dumps frequently pile up heaps of garbage. In one of those dumps I made out three wooden suitcases, the sort of case that used to be taken to schools in the rural areas. The suitcases were slightly soiled but in good condition, with their hinges and lock mechanisms still in place. One was painted brown, and the others were unpainted and unvarnished. The raw plywood of one of the latter clearly read the name of the person who had owned it, and the name of her school.

The female students—these cases were for the use of girls only—would store in them, behind their padlocks, their Sunday clothes and food. I suffered from the syndrome of owning a case that proclaimed to be a “traveled” one, because it wore several stickers from faraway places like Gdansk and Praha. Made of reinforced cardboard and metal corner braces, my brother had taken it with him when he left for his studies in Socialist countries in 1962. The case had been the cause of much mockery, denouncing me as a “mama’s girl” in a sea of proletarians. In those times, when the future belonged entirely to Socialism, my suitcase denounced my socially privileged background. I enrolled myself in extra work hours with the system, and went vanguard so the suitcase would not get me into trouble due to my differentiated situation.

Seeing these three suitcases, all ready for their journey to oblivion, I thought about their owner, I thought about who I had been, and I thought of all those things that have gone to the garbage.

February 2 2011

A new movie in Italian, Spanish and English.

Click on the photo — or here — for the website and to watch the movie.

I have a friend who will call her mother to record her telenovela — the soap opera — so she won’t miss it when she’s at a party. For my part, it was one of those I didn’t hear about, even when a new one started. So things stood, I being pretty radical in not letting myself get snagged by the mass media. That is until the other day when I saw a fragment of a new soap opera from Brazil.

It’s about a back-of-beyond country town in Brazil where two young men, a journalists and a publicist, arrive to start a newspaper. They report on a bartender, leader of the opposition in the place, who tries to criticize current policies and denounce the excesses of the administration in power. In addition, they want to promote some campaigns that could benefit the community, and so they invite all the dissidents to participate in the project.

Then I understood everything. Like when one is engaged in an abstract mathematical problem and suddenly a simple formula solves the whole numerical mess. A sort of mystical enlightenment. I understood in that instant why the better part of the population of my country obsessively watches soap operas. I felt like calling my friend and telling her I’d discovered the mystery behind the TV screen. She watches the shows perhaps because the women always find the love of their life — my friend has a certain obsession with that topic — my mother watches because the houses are always clean and bright, the mother-in-law of a friend because the Brazilian landscape is dazzling, and a neighbor because the bad guys never win.

I imagined myself disembarking, let’s say, in the newly created province of Mayabeque — recently created from part of Havana province — and opening a newspaper called, for example, “Havana Forever.” It could focus my attention, perhaps, on what a disaster it’s been for a whole community to have left the capital without even changing their place of residence. It would address the local news ignored by the official press, and of course could analyze the work of the cadres in the area in exposing corruption. It would also give a voice to the opposition politicians in the neighborhood. In short, after so much dreaming, since last week I, too, have been watching the telenovela: That magical world on the screen where you can go from town to town opening newspapers where they talk about politics and criticize the government.

This morning my friend got up early and in a very good mood. She needed to undertake a long journey and she knew it. She needed to send her cousin, who lives outside of our planet a birth certificate. Fearing long walks—public transportation gets worse and worse with time—she put on a pair of sneakers.

Using those acrobatics she had learned so well during her years as a dancer, she was successful boarding the first bus that stopped. The buses that had passed by before had not even come close to where she was standing; they would stop way before or way after the bus stop and a run would have been required to catch them. Experiencing all sorts of different sensations, she was able to squeeze in and tangle up with the other riders so that she would be able to get off the bus quickly at her destination.

Once there, she of course needed to continue on foot, as the office she needed to go to was a few blocks away from the nearest stop. Once at the office, and after getting the last available number and waiting for another two hours for her turn to come, she finally asked the employee behind the desk for the certificate she had come for. The employee, with a certain amount of idleness, and moving like she had all the time in the world, grabbed a big ledger book, leafed through it for a long time, and finally told her: Sorry, girl, we don’t have that document here. You need to request it at the Registry on Acosta and 10 de Octubre streets.

With all the cool that one can keep in a case like this, my friend embarked once again on her mission to trace down the document she needed. After walking for quite a long time, once at the new office, she requested the document from an employee. And this woman, after the volume and page of the ledger was confirmed, finally told her: But, sweetheart, that is not here. It’s at the Registry you were at before. Tell them there that I ask that they look for it carefully. I don’t know what’s wrong with them; they keep sending me people by mistake.

My friend tells me that, at this point in the saga, her blood was boiling in her veins, but keeping in mind the Chopra book she had read, she decided to sit quietly at the edge of the sidewalk and count to twenty. Little by little she managed to calm down. But she suspected that the worst was not over. That the worst would happen when she finally had possession of the document and made the call to her cousin to ask for the hundred-fifty dollars that it costs to legalize the certificate, as he lives abroad. A long road lied ahead of her. And all of that for a freaking document, one you can request online in other places, and one you receive afterwards through snail mail. And for no charge, on top of it all.

January 29 2011

It was January of 1998. The city was getting ready for a huge occasion: the visit of the Pope. Our beloved friend Father José Conrado was a guest in our house, staying in the little room upstairs. It was during those unforgettable days when we met Marquetti. He would come each morning to collect JC and drive him around. We became fast friends, as we would ask him to stay for breakfast, something he was enthusiastic about from the start.

During those morning conversations after our meal, we learned that Marquetti—like everyone came to call him fondly—was renting his Lada for those trips, and this enabled him to bear all the costs of gasoline and other expenses. I will never forget the pleasure with which he would butter his bread, exclaiming: Man, it’s been a long time since I had this kind of feast!

Among laughter and jokes he would also talk about serious things, like those times some police officer would stop check him on the road—he did not have a proper license—and, upon seeing his ID card, the officer would tell him “Sorry, my friend. How on Earth can I give you a fine? What I’d like is an autograph!”

I was quite excited yesterday when a friend of mine sent me a clipping from a newspaper abroad (no one has mentioned anything here) describing the tribute he was paid in Miami on the 16th of this month, where five thousand fans, from early in the morning, filled the Rubén Darío stadium to attend a softball match between the Industriales and Cuba.

There were no parking meters left, according to the article, and the match had to be suspended after 45 minutes of play for the organizers to deal with the parking problem. Like we say in my planet, the ebony giant stopped traffic in Miami.

This is one of the most emotive tributes I have ever been paid, said the former slugger of the Industriales team. Many figures from the professional baseball world—most of them former Industriales—came over to greet him. Others who could not attend in person made sure to give him a phone call. The festivities concluded among photos and autographs.

It was once again demonstrated that it doesn’t matter what shore you are at: when it comes to Cubans, those barriers that they try so hard to impose on us never work. Above anything else, that sentiment of cubanía—Cubanhood—will always unite us because, like the Apostle once said: To honor, honors.

January 24 2011

Untitled from Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo on Vimeo.

January 10 2011

The fictional long-feature film Old House (Casa Vieja) has returned to the cinemas and to Screen #2 of La Infanta, where it can be enjoyed from 13-26 January by those who did not have the pleasure of watching it during the last Havana Film Festival, whose jury awarded it a Special Mention and the Popular Award, which lifted its maker’s Lester Hamlet’s ego; he expressed to Cacilia Crespo, journalist for The Film and Video Programme, that the re-writing of the play by Abelardo Estorino gave him the chance to speak from his essence and nationalism, to “narrate, from a human standpoint, a new conflict; to seek, to find, to suggest.”

According to the filmmaker, his first work has found its natural niche within the present national film world, because it “speaks from the history of history and tells naked truths, undresses its fears with courage, and already participates in a conscious process of thousands of viewers who have welcomed it in their lives.” He adds that it is “a Cuban film made from patriotic pride.”

This defense is allowed but one needs not to exaggerate. Old House does not tackle any new conflict nor does it suggest anything extraordinary, even if it deals with enduring motivations of aesthetic resonance—cohabiting, sexuality and the existential trances of a family stuck in time—from a human angle. The family is stuck in the 90’s, but with a 60’s resonance in a run-down house where the patriarch is dying, an event that forces the youngest of his sons—a successful yet shy gay man who, without intending to, unties certain taboos and miseries sheltered by male chauvinism and social intolerance—to return home.

The melodramatic atmosphere of the household is one rooted in family values and traditions. A revolutionary past and the respect for established order—referenced by cyclones, armies, mobilizations and labor, as symbolized by the oldest son—palpitates within the home. The actor who plays this role is aging Alberto Pujol, whose character is a married man with children who works as the chauffeur for a town politician, and who despises the irreverent street-sweeper (Isabel Santos) who implores the recently arrived son to assist a young girl from the community who has been offered a scholarship abroad but has been denied an exit permit.

The rest of the film revolves around reminiscences of the mother (Adria Santana) and her other children (played by Yadier Fernández and Daysi Quintana), the brother of the dying man (Manuel Porto), some exterior shots of the coastal town, and funerary and burial scenes where some government secretary directs the acts and is interrupted by the main character, who hates hypocrisy.

The contradictions in Old House are reduced to the distancing of the prodigal son—shy, cultured and mundane—from family masks and from the immobility of the townspeople, which is why, prior to his return to Spain, he tells his mother he only loves “living things that change.”

That’s where the “naked truths” and the “patriotic pride” end. There is nothing transcendental, neither in the acting performance of characters—limited by spaces and dialogs that were written for a different medium—nor in the geriatric atmosphere of stillness, poverty and lack of expectations. Perhaps the clue to the film needs to be looked for in the recreation of misery, the love frustrations of the marrying sister and in the untimely and honest street-sweeper played by Isabel Santos.

The reception of a work of art does not always confirm its worth or its contemporary character. Maybe hundreds of people witnessed their own secrets revealed by the characters of Old House, but the film seemed, to me, ambiguous and poor. The topic of the stigma of the homosexual in the family, the return of migrants who come back with a different perception, and the patriotic myth is well-digested bread in the island’s film milieu.

January 26 2011

This sign caught my eye immediately, because it proudly decorated a splendid Cadillac minibus from 1947 that looked as brand-new as if it had just left the dealer’s showroom.

There are several almendrones—those big cars that look like big almonds, all from before 1959—making their way back to the streets these days. A booming image of self-employment. Some of them are as eye-catching and well-preserved as this one, while others are less groomed but equally well-preserved. Some have even been put back on the streets after having been written-off—their clumsy bodywork and hand-painted appearance make it obvious—but they too still travel proudly along the roads of my planet, offering a service that was urgently needed.

The self-employed worker feels happy to finally be able to experience that little chunk of labor independence, even when, in order do so, they need to deal with tons of numbers and sweat like pigs.

Collective transport, which has become more and more scarce and inefficient, makes the working day an extremely complicated endeavor. Most of the time people, tired of uselessly waiting for a bus—let alone one they can board—end up walking off. These big almonds, which after the recent economic measures have proliferated, are the ones basically solving this problem. But, that said, let’s be clear, it’s at a very high price. Some professionals have confessed to me that their entire salaries are devoured by this mode of transport, and that they are only able to have clothes and food because they have a relative abroad who supports them so they can keep their job and thus avoid bigger problems.

January 26 2011

THE CUBAN FORUM

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In Cubanacán, at the western exit off Havana, not far from where the commercial imagination of the Fifties gave birth to a racetrack and even a drive-in, the remains still exist of what was most important film set in Latin America.

A first-class studio-hangar, formerly soundproofed, formerly luxuriously lit and with a formerly First World atmosphere (from before there was even a concept of the First World).

The “Forum,” it is called today by its proud keepers, not without nostalgia, although they don’t know what lies inside this cinematographic cube in ruins. Ah, the Forum, the Forum, I repeat after having worked in its belly of hernias open to the moon and the sun and to Cuban cyclones. A cinemummytographic forum…

It stinks. Sacred humidity. Mediatic Middle Ages. The smell of stage machinery of fiberglass and also the putrid water that optimizes the acoustics thanks to the swimming pool underground: the mantle of the fossilized water table of island capitalism, homeopathic relic of the Republic that the Revolution didn’t manage to dry up.

It stinks of a star-system that never made it to Hollywood, neighborhood supernovas immediately transformed into exiled stars or conscripts of Cuban Institute of Radio and Television. Because something cracked inside the Forum, something opened a gash in the space-time surrounding this bubble of fiction, live or tape-delayed.

Reality swept its false magic, populist aesthetic of the elite, Sunday soap-operas with God.

Our beloved Cuba, compañeros—why postpone the swear word—mercilessly fucked this Forum up.

I’ve been there, so don’t dismiss me. I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore, but I have been there, among its classic six scenic coffin-like walls (except the ceiling, which is now a Hubble-style lookout facing the magnificence of outer space).

I’ve clicked my Canon camera among graffiti of dollar videoclips and amorous bat shit, its only ultrasonic defenders against the desert budget of the Cuban film industry officialdom.

At night, I’ve heard what sounds like the hollow laments of a young girl. What sounds like her empty moans, rising from her chest to her throat. The pouts of a dead girl in full post-preterit abundance.

Once I asked an audio assistant, a rare angel who balanced the microphone boom and an archaic analog console. “There,” I asked her, “Point there, please, and record.”

And she obeyed me shivering, doubting my sanity, and turned it up to the maximum, her impedance—or whatever they call the sensitivity—(she was, all of her, pure glass technique), and spent entire minutes with her eyes hidden under a pair of headphones bigger than her head (a little panda bear that very quickly became extinct).

“Nothing,” she said almost crying at the absence of my ghost, “they’re probably crickets,” “they’re probably those cars along 222,” “parasitic noises, Landy,” “t’is the wind and nothing more.” Poe.mp3…

By day I’ve seen it raining inside, in a gorgeous dive, a wonder in backlight thanks to the HMI luminaries perhaps from the Fifties too. Our audiovisual art is doomed to be retro (besides retrovolutionary, of course).

And sometimes you have to stop the shooting because the buried pool emits unusual waves from under the cement floor, a cemetery under our feet over which Tomas Piard, for example, filmed the nudes of his tragedies, always allegorical to the two thousand or year zero of island socialism, insulated in that Forum, marginalized even from the Made In MINCULT censorship.

I don’t want to go back there. I won’t return, except as a fugitive from the Cuban Made in MININT justice. And exclusively only to find there death in a shooting, prop bullets that split my heart with the greatest fiscal sadness, while I magisterially make love to my love, who will probably be that girl with the headphones so as not to distract her from her orgasms with the patrol sirens, nor the loud voices of anonymous State counterintelligence colonels (the State is never intelligent), nor my screams of an animal hunted to death, shrieking with the frustration of a blade-runner android who is bleeding and is once again a noble child before using up the batteries of his life cycle.

Like a bad road-movie, the only ones worth the trouble.

Like in a nightmare script full of clichés, the only ones that don’t seem recited by the actors.

Like Cuba, fuck!, supine position encased in a forum where there was never enough talent to shoot happiness.

In Cubanacán, at the western exit off Havana, not too far from where the dying imagination of those ten years will not give birth or abort absolutely anything after the desire and death of my delirium.

January 12 2011